Social Matter

On Sunday, a convention of several thousand furries in Chicago was unceremoniously disrupted by an intentional chlorine gas leak. Nineteen attendees of Midwest FurFest were quickly rushed off to the hospital, complaining of dizziness. Everyone else in the building hightailed it to shelters in the surrounding area, which cleared the way for hazardous materials technicians to investigate what exactly broke up the furry dance parties. A short four hours later, the furries re-entered the building after waiting outside in the cold in the middle of the night.

“A lot of people thought this was just someone pulling the fire alarm,” 27-year-old Thomas Zell said. Zell further remarked that pulling the fire alarm is a regular occurrence at furry conventions. “But it was serious this time,” he added.

Furry fandom grew out of the 1980s as a subculture of folks who anthropomorphize animals and dress up in mascot-like suits while role-playing. But the development of a more expansive aesthetic is relatively recent, a consequence of the advent of the Internet, which allows weird segments of the population to connect with one another and organize physical get-togethers like conferences. Blame Usenet’s alt.lifestyle.furry. Somewhat related is the Tumblr –kin phenomenon, in which the psychologically troubled shed whatever semi-healthy identity they could’ve maintained with external help and adopt identities more concomitant with their particular pathologies—pathologies which should’ve been discouraged by the wider culture. But since reinforcement through online communities is possible, pathologies can flourish.

Sometimes –kin/furry pathologies translate into body modifications, instead of expensive mascot suits.

Before you start becoming a little too sympathetic at the chlorine debacle, previous events hosting furries (not at this particular hotel)—notably one in Vancouver—had to post a sign prohibiting mutual masturbation in the public areas of hotel.

Surprise!

It’s hard to understand this behavior without adopting an anthropological frame. Furries, like homosexuals, are skilled at public relations, and like Puss in Boots, switch from wide-eyed innocents at one moment to the sort who are ready to jerk each other off in full view of children while directing lewd comments their way.

For cladistically left thedes, the press usually offers friendly bemusement, and others like Gawker offer near unqualified support and hammer any dissenters as furryphobes. But even on Gawker the occasional commenter who has up-close-and-personal experience rears his head for a brief moment before being submerged by the obfuscating rabble.

If a viable culture does not discourage delving deep into pathologies, deviant subcultures will spring up and fill the vacuum. A study conducted by Kathleen C. Gerbasi in 2008 found that 43.1 percent of 209 attendees at a furry convention identified with the following statement: “You were born with this connection to your non-human species.”

Here are a couple of the other statements from participants:

“A feeling that in a previous life you were your non-human species and you have been reincarnated as a human.” – 27.8 percent

“A persistent feeling of discomfort or inappropriateness concerning your human body.” – 23.9 percent

It’s been noted that furry sexuality is quite fluid, which makes sense if furrydom as a whole is classified as species dysphoria. This dysphoria, like most other activities deemed deviant and degenerate by the socon crowd, displays an inexplicable and consistent co-morbidity with a litany of other disorders–inexplicable, that is, if you hypothesize that furrydom is an innocuous identity. It surely can’t be because of the persecution. Innumerable groups throughout history  have experienced far worse than someone pulling the fire alarm at a convention. You don’t need an exact control group in an experiment.

You need a fortiori–expertly used by St. Paul in the New Testament: “How much more, then?” These groups haven’t been persecuted equivalently. They’ve been persecuted with far worse and displayed resiliency. They don’t magnify and glorify  ‘microaggressions,’ since that’d be interpreted as a sign of weakness. Which groups am I referring to? Pick your poison. A lot of people like to reference Asians and Jews in America. Even the Irish and Italians. Or maybe Falun Gong or Christianity in China, though I’m not saying they’ve escaped unscathed. That’s hardly the point.

The point is the absence of co-morbidity and the presence of resiliency.

Furrydom doesn’t magically disappear with the right rituals and incantations for casting out demons. But it would help.  The cultural context in which a furry feels comfortable identifying and indulging in a harmful personal and social identity should be crushed by the overarching culture, not tolerated. Furries should be marginalized.

Pathologize the bad, extol the good. In comes the press to the anti-rescue.

The press, as usual, gets to determine what counts as a Meaning Culture for youth. Christianity is near-universally ridiculed and frame-controlled into an obsequious, decaying community center to liberalism. This means that other Meaning Cultures take precedence. Even the most deviant subcultures, so long as they don’t thwart liberalism, are viewed as avant-garde, which transitions to acceptance in fairly short order. Meaning Cultures usually have a variety of inward roads—take the Electronic Dance Music (EDM) scene. Some lost kid stumbles into a dance club and meets a friendly group of people in a place designed to disorient.

That’s precisely what makes clubs successful. Disorientation. He keeps in contact. He pops E and after a few weeks goes on a road trip with the EDMers. They start babbling about chakras and energy bracelets, and the few times where he lets out any signs of unacceptable frames—e.g. comments about gays or not using proper pronouns or considering new age spirituality to be vain, narcissistic, and self-serving—he’s harshly reprimanded. The more traumatic the reprimanding is, the better.

When he falls into the frame and signals accordingly, he’s given excessive praise. It happens very quickly. Belief-network pwnage occurs. This describes the acceptance of certain fundamental premises of the ingroup, and from this premises it appears that all sorts of supposedly coherent and interrelated implications follow, though in reality they are far removed from one another. In other words, the new kid Joe now believes that consciousness-mangling drugs implies that electronic dance music is the only language of the gods, organic, non-GMO food grown within a 20 mile radius is the only acceptable form of victuals, and finally that the government is conspiring with Walmart to ensure you and the rest of the world don’t have access to these drugs, since wide use would mean an end to all Christianity hatred and sectarianism and violence and poverty. Wear this energy bracelet: science and spirituality are one in the same, and they imply all of the above.

The actual implications are usually nonsense. You adopt the main premises and then feel secure and comfortable adopting ingroup semiotic patterns. Memes want to duplicate themselves, and they’re constantly on the prowl for more lifeblood.

A healthy culture is important, since most don’t have the agency to buck a sick culture and end up unconsciously falling into societally prescribed patterns. Even if you have the ability to recognize disordered trends, the ability to will yourself in the opposite direction doesn’t necessarily follow. This phenomenon is made worse when opposing communities fracture neatly across the country, since isolation crushes opposition to the dominant narrative.

You need a strong culture to oppose a culture, and if you sink a man’s boat, you’re obliged to toss him a life raft.